hands up to my face and lose my shit. I had fucking promised, and I wasn’t going to go back on my word. Instead, I made myself keep my eyes forward on that blue water that hadn’t changed in the least bit since the last time we’d been to this beach so long ago.
I clung to that memory like it was a lifeline sent to save me. A lifeline to one of the best days in my life—and a reminder that I’d had so many best days over the course of it. A reminder of just how fucking lucky I was that maybe life hadn’t always been easy, but it had been—it was—amazing.
And that was what my grandpa had always wanted for me. For all of his loved ones.
Which was why I tied that memory to my wrist and let it lift me up like an oversized balloon.
This was the beach where Grandpa Gus and Peter had gotten married after nearly thirty-one years together. Right here. Well, close by. Under the Hawaiian sun, with enormous smiles over both of their faces, while my gramps cracked jokes at his groom and at the not-so-small party they’d invited to watch them each put a ring on it. A marriage thirty years and a lot of sacrifices and a lot of love in the making, that had only happened once Peter had retired and Grandpa Gus had decided to sell Maio House.
“You and Peter are Maio House to me, Len. And I’m tired of keeping it a secret. You have a life here, a career. You’re not giving that up for the gym,” he had reasoned with me a month after Jonah’s contract with the Kobe Chargers had ended, days after he had signed a new three-year contract with his old team in Auckland.
And sure enough, six months later, Maio House had been sold to a group of three former fighters who had pooled their money together. It had been a little bittersweet, but just a little. Because how the hell could I have been upset when the moment after we’d talked about his decision, he’d asked, “What do you think about a wedding on a beach in Kauai?”
I’d swear I could still hear the way the ordained minister had asked my creature of ancient evil if he took Peter as his lawfully wedded husband, and how he’d answered, “I guess so” with his trademark little smirk before his face had sobered and he’d added, “Yes. For the rest of my life.”
Another fucking choke appeared in my throat, and I decided maybe I shouldn’t have delved into that memory so deeply because that time, I couldn’t keep my shit totally under wraps. The choke sprang up and out of my throat, and one single tear escaped my eye at the same time Jonah’s hand slipped out from under mine, and he threw a heavy, still-muscular arm over the tops of my shoulders. He sidestepped into me, his cheek slotting over the top of my head, and he snuggled me even as his own throat bubbled with deep chokes he was trying to hold back and mostly failing at. My sweet, wonderful man. The same man who had never given me a single reason to doubt or regret any of the decisions I’d made for him—for us.
“Are you remembering the wedding?” Jonah asked in a voice just barely an inch tall, weary and about as soft as he was capable of as that still big body shook against mine with so much emotion it triggered another tear out of me.
“Yeah,” I answered him, taking a sniff and wrapping my free arm around his waist to hold him right back. My other hand gave the one I was holding a squeeze.
I wasn’t the only one mourning and trying hard not to, I remembered.
We had all lost Grandpa Gus two months ago.
My fucking watery nose betrayed me and made something wet that I wasn’t going to bother wiping off drip over the top of my lip and down the side of my mouth as I thought about the day that Peter had come into the kitchen, face pale and eyes stunned at first. How he had stood there for a moment while the rest of us looked at him expectantly. Not knowing what he was about to drop on us. Not knowing what had happened.
And then he’d smiled gently, his throat had bobbed, and he’d said the last words I would have ever imagined, “Gus is